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Next to the wonder of going up and down the streets,
and in and out of the houses, and traversing the secret
chambers of the temples of a religion that has vanished
from the earth, and finding so many fresh traces of remote
antiquity: as if the course of Time had been stopped after
this desolation, and there had been no nights and days,
months, and centuries, since: nothing is more impressive
and terrible than the many evidences of the searching
nature of the ashes, as bespeaking their irresistible power,
and the impossibility of escaping them. In the wine-cellars,
they forced their way into the earthen vessels: displacing
the wine and choking them, to the brim, with dust. In
the tombs, they forced the ashes of the dead from the
funeral urns, and rained new ruin even into them. The
mouths, and eyes, and skulls of all the skeletons, were
stuffed with this terrible hail. In Herculaneum, where the
flood was of a different and a heavier kind, it rolled in,
like a sea. Imagine a deluge of water turned to marble,
at its height - and that is what is called «the lava» here.

Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on the
brink of which we now stand, looking down, when they
came on some of the stone benches of the Theatre -
those steps (for such they seem) at the bottom of the
excavation - and found the buried city of Herculaneum.
Presently going down, with lighted torches, we are per-
plexed by great walls of monstrous thickness, rising up
between the benches, shutting out the stage obtruding
their shapeless forms in absurd places, confusing the
whole plan, and making it a disordered dream. We can-

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